Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) Share this | Hansard source

Yes—no-one's allowed to see it. I want to tell you a story, because that was just absolutely appalling. I don't think Senator Ayres actually knows what a foundational support may or may not look like. They clearly didn't define it for him in the minister's information that they provided to him.

Part of this is that the states and territories need to pick it up. If the current ineptitude of state and federal systems to be able to work together doesn't shock you and horrify you, this sort of instance is likely happening way more than the instance I have been dealing with and is probably going to get worse when some of these things are put into place. Over the past couple of months I have been dealing with a family of a 16-year-old profoundly autistic verbally limited boy with an intellectual disability as well as significant PTSD and trauma who comes from a broken home. The mother and the son, who I know, are amazing. The brother of this boy and the mother are amazing humans who love this child very, very much, but it has become unsafe for him to be in the house with them. He has psychiatric and psychological supports who referred him for admission to care, to be placed into psychiatric care.

The mother first contacted me one Sunday morning when there had been an episode, when there had been an incident. She had taken him to the emergency ward asking for the admission to go ahead with the referral. She was told, 'I just had to go home and get more NDIS funding.' 'Go home and get more NDIS funding' is what state health systems in New South Wales said to the mother of a profoundly autistic son who is intellectually disabled, has limited verbal skills, PTSD and significant behavioural issues, which make it unsafe for him to be at home with his younger brother and his mother because he is now about half a foot-plus taller than his mother and considerably larger.

I worked with the mother through that Sunday and we managed to achieve some sort of solution. We then found that, because he is under 18, it became a matter for Family and Community Services in the hospital and the NDIS. The mother was consistently told he was going to be basically booted out of the psych ward at the end of the week. She said, 'He can't. He's not ready. We're not ready. We don't have the tools yet to be able to handle this.' Family and Community Services and the NDIS could not get together and talk. This mother called me in such a state because it had got to the point that she was going to be forced to relinquish her son to the care of the state because it was not safe for her to take her son home. It was not safe for her, not safe for her other child. It was not safe for this boy, yet the NDIS and the New South Wales health department and Family and Community Services could not get together and talk to find a resolution. In desperation, I ended up emailing the CEO of the agency, Minister Shorten and the Attorney-General of New South Wales, begging them to please put something together to try to resolve this issue. We managed to get a temporary stay for a period of time.

Every child and every family that is faced with the inadequacies of state and federal systems, because of the failure to link those services together, because of the silos that exist between governments and government services—it is not defined, who is responsible for what is an important lack of definition. There is a requirement for no wrong door for these families and these kids. People don't seem to understand, even in this place, when we talk about the importance of how these things operate. The importance of getting this right is too often thrown out with the politics of the situation—casting aspersions and smears—when the reality is there are people whose lives depend on it. A child whose family may be forced to relinquish him—this is not a child who is not well loved or is not wanted; this is a child who has an incredibly supportive and loving family and who has been accessing amazing therapy since he was two because the family has been so engaged. But such is the extent of his disability and impairment that going home was not possible.

When we look at this through the political lens, we look at it by saying: 'This is my bailiwick. That's your patch. I'm not touching you over here.' What this does to families is bad enough, let alone what it would cost for this child to receive the support that he requires in the right psychological residential situations versus what it would cost for him to be relinquished to the state to be responsible for everything around that. We know most kids who go into family and community services, certainly in New South Wales, end up in a motel because there isn't enough foster care and there aren't enough support services for them in family and community services. So what was an already terrible situation was on the precipice of being made absolutely fundamentally worse, and possibly irrevocably worse. Maybe it's lucky this mum happened to know my mobile number and could come to me, but not everyone on the NDIS has that. Not everyone on the NDIS has the capability or even the mindset to be able to do that—to literally have a senator reach out to those responsible begging for some action.

This is not something that we should just toss around as if it's not going to cause a fundamental difference. We hear about people using money on different things. Yes, there are things that are bought on the NDIS that are wildly inappropriate. Nothing makes me more angry, as the mother of a participant, than when I hear of people rorting this system. But more times than not it's the providers that are rorting the system, not the participants or their families. We know there is no safety net in this legislation when it comes to the plan managers who overspend plans without the participant's knowledge. There's nothing in it. We don't address what's actually happening when it comes to providers and plan managers, because it's all about: 'Let's just throw people with a disability into some big basket and say that they must all be rorting the system. They must all be using this for ill-advised purposes.' We know it is a very, very small number of people. What a surprise! This is government money with very little framework put in place around it. Who knew there would be bad actors coming into that space? What a joke!

I come back to foundational supports and what they are, and the importance of getting them right. As is the case with this 16-year-old autistic boy, the foundational supports, the foundations of care that should have been available in the state system—what the state is actually responsible for providing—weren't there, and they were pushing it back to the NDIS. If there was so much consultation taking place, why are the state premiers still writing to the committee? Why are they putting out a statement today saying they want the bill delayed because they haven't agreed to what they're expected to deliver, they're not ready to deliver what they're supposed to be delivering and they are concerned people with a disability will fall through the gaps? If that one case I just shared with you doesn't demonstrate how the states, in so many ways, are not up to the task and have decided not to deliver the services they should for disabled people because of the NDIS, what are we doing to bridge that gap?